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For the first time in months, I don’t have anything planned. No photo projects, no editing, and honestly, it’s a nice feeling to have no obligations. I come home and read a book, dance with Jeff around the studio. I sit in the middle of my living room floor, scooping last bits of daylight. All year I’ve unconsciously kept busy, writing and taking photos, organizing my mother’s belongings, navigating through grief. Now it’s as if the world stopped and I finally noticed what was around me. Or I stopped, and looked around, wondering, where have I been? I’m steeling myself for the long winter ahead, just shy of a year since my mother passed away. Everything has changed.
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Filed under: Pennsylvania | Tags: polaroid spectra, river town, softtone film, time travel
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Neville Island has always been something of a mystery to me. It’s the largest inhabited island in the Ohio River, and once a farmland hub for nearby cities. During World War II, it became a ship building center, with factories popping up at either end of it. Growing up, I remember “Poison Park,” a designated patch of unusable land that now has an ice skating rink. But the Island is more than its fabled industry. We still go roller skating at Neville Rollerdrome, which hasn’t changed its decor since the 70s. The houses along Front River Road are old, some dating back to the Civil-war era, with sprawling porches and giant green lawns. The old Neville school is for sale, and Jeff and I dreamed of ways to divide chunks of it to make into a living space. We stood facing the barges parked along the riverbank, listened for the whispering rustle of leaves.
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Filed under: Pennsylvania | Tags: coraopolis, gift, linda, mother, mourning, sidewalk
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In the middle of a crushingly busy day, I received a text from my sister. It was an image of a name carved into cement and when I looked closely at the tiny phone screen, I realized it was our mother’s name, a small bright spot of hope in an emotionally trying week. My sister had walked around one of our old neighborhoods in Coraopolis with my niece, showing her the apartment we lived in on the corner of Broadway and Second streets when she found it. I had forgotten that my mother had done this, along with her friend, who had traced “Jeff Loves Maureen 1984″ in the pavement close to my mother’s name. My mother was only 33, younger than I am now, but too old to stir up this kind of mischief. The landlord had yelled at her in a mix of Italian and English, but secretly, I think he got a kick out of it because it’s still there after all this time. A few nights ago, I had to take a friend out to the airport, so I drove by beforehand to see it for myself. The house looks mostly the same, brown trim replacing the green, and the new tenants added a porch swing. The cottage next to it is gone, the one where we imagined a witch lived. Our Sicilian neighbor’s house is abandoned, but I remember her bent in black dress and stockings, a scarf tied under her chin, her once-lush garden overgrown with knee-high grass and caged in a chain-link fence. The streets feel smaller and broken. I had lived for so many years in memory, that I had forgotten this was a real place, somewhere I used to call home.
where the witch once lived
a current resident who talked with us about the old neighborhood
the kitten that followed us everywhere
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Despite the technical imperfections of this photo batch, I like them because they capture a simple, beautiful moment in my summer: sitting with friends around a fire, talking about everything and nothing. Toasting marshmallows. Lightening bugs and black sky dotted with stars. I thought about all that has happened so far this year, how some days are harder than others. And some days it leads up to the small moments. Just this.
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Filed under: Pennsylvania | Tags: butler, carnival, county fair, escape, farm
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Things I learned at the Butler County fair: Hot waffle ice cream sandwiches are an amazing invention. Alpacas are addictive. Sword swallowing produces a white foam that coats the edge of a blade. Rastafarian bananas are a popular children’s toy in rural Pennsylvania. It takes at least 500 ring tosses to win a pocket knife. Jeff is pretty sexy in a pink cowboy hat. Corn dogs are best topped with sriracha. Dark rides do not scare children. An eye is a mirror.
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Filed under: Pennsylvania | Tags: ashes, birthday, gettysburg, memorial, mourning
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Today is my birthday and what I wouldn’t give to hear my mother’s voice again. She dreamed of being a writer, but the emotional pain she experienced, especially in her last years, left her without the energy to do it. While organizing her estate a few months back though, we came across a tape recorder that my stepfather had given to her for Christmas. We stood around the kitchen table, curious and heartbroken while my stepfather pressed the play button. And her voice cut through the static of background noise, a blaring episode of M*A*S*H. Over the helicopter whir, she tells us through the tiny metal box, This is Linda, and I’m recording this for the purpose of my book. She pauses; the sound of shuffling papers, something drops to the floor, the theme music to one of her favorite programs. We wait with breath abated. We wonder what secrets she will tell us. Now, how do you turn this thing off? She asks and we laugh. Because it was so much my mother – my mother who was always the center of attention, who wanted so much for people to listen when she filled her heart with stories. Someday I’ll work up the courage to go through her notebooks and read them, but knowing she is there among the pages is enough for me.
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Filed under: Pennsylvania | Tags: bed of nails, carnival, gaff, independence day, snake girl
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Yeah, I know I wasted three bucks looking at chipped wooden gaffs of JoJo the Dog Faced Boy but it was a birthday gift well-spent. I remember many summer afternoons as a kid, sweating my butt off in front of a metal fan blowing hot air on my back while reading my mother’s tattered copy of Guinness Book of World Records, shocked and amazed at a woman who was so tiny, she could have been one of my dolls; the tallest man in the world, towering over his parents in their Depression-era living room; conjoined twins who fathered almost a dozen children each; and the man with fingernails curling like delicate tendrils of skin. Happy birthday, America, and thanks for the trip down memory lane.
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Filed under: Pennsylvania | Tags: church, hallway, junk shop, primary colors, self portrait
a junk shop in Westmoreland County
Usually the photos support the text in my posts or vice versa, but these four outtakes don’t really belong together. I just liked how they turned out and wanted to share them. They are evidence of some of the things I’ve done this past month – trash hunting, getting lost, a photo shoot with Sarah, a Sunday morning where I tried to take a picture of myself staring at the camera, but found the last photo the best of the batch. I’ve had insomnia and neck pain, a week where I cried over ’70s romance films, where I ate lots of dark chocolate goat’s milk fudge. I thought about how I take hundreds of photos each month and weed out the shit to only a few images. I don’t feel as if every photo taken is a precious moment or should be seen. I learned through writing and grieving to listen to my heart and let go.
the last photo at Sarah's
mckeesport
insomnia
Filed under: Pennsylvania | Tags: 1970s, cinderblock, creepy, high school, westmoreland
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Last weekend I dropped off artwork for the Westmoreland Art Nationals and got creeped out by the sci-fi fluorescent lighting in this community college, which looked so much like my old high school. I know I watch too many crappy horror flicks, but isn’t there something really eerie about an empty high school circa 1976? The flesh-colored lockers, the one lamp still turned on in a dark library. All these arbitrary numbers painted on cinderblock, marking the end of each hallway.
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Filed under: Pennsylvania | Tags: city, downtown, hotel, image stories, self portraits, william penn
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My friend Kris, whom I’ve known for almost 15 years, got married on May 7. It was a lovely wedding – simple and elegant, a grown-up affair that gave me the chance to wear one of my vintage lbd’s, drinking glass after glass of Chardonnay. Yet my inner trashiness surfaced as I hogged through plates of dumplings, invaded empty lounge areas for photos and cursed my awesome-looking heels as they tortured my feet. Events like weddings give me access to places I normally wouldn’t have the courage to just walk into for photo opportunities. In between the cocktail reception and dinner we ran around the lobby, then the tea room, rode the elevators to check out different floors. It was like stepping into the plot of the mystery novels I love so much when I need an escape.
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